To describe it, you would have to invent a color: something like nightmare blue. Line B of the RER indeed holds a sad record: it is the least punctual of the year 2021, according to the classification of Ile-de-France Mobilités, the establishment in charge of the Ile-de-France network. A statistic that will not surprise its travelers, who have been facing almost daily disruptions for years. With painful consequences. Simon, a young literature teacher, remembers: “When I was teaching in Villepinte, a few months ago, I missed a lot of class hours because of the delays”.
“Frankly, I saturate…, echoes Abou, from Blanc-Mesnil. During my studies in Paris, then when I started working there, I was often late, with journeys of more than 1h30” . On Twitter, where the failures of the “B” became a running gag, we no longer count the sarcasms, sometimes comical, of exasperated travellers. It must be said that the famous blue line, which connects the north and the south of Ile-de-France, from Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport (Seine-Saint-Denis) to the Chevreuse valley (Yvelines), is the second busiest in Europe and stretches over 80 kilometres.
But if the RER B finds itself at the center of controversy, it is not only because of its slowness. In September 2021, Eric Zemmour, then putative candidate for the presidential election, takes it as an illustration of his concept of “great replacement”. To the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire, who castigates this “old French fantasy”, he retorts on Twitter: “I propose to Bruno Le Maire to go and see the fantasy in the RER B”. The latter serves several cities in the North of Seine-Saint-Denis (La Courneuve, Aubervilliers, Aulnay, Sevran, etc.), the youngest department in metropolitan France, which in 2020 has 70% immigrants and descendants of immigrants (This great inconvenience. Immigration in front, by Didier Leschi, Gallimard, 2020). “There are almost no white people, apart from tourists who go to Roissy or Orly”, assures Karim, professor of history and geography from 93 and great detractor of this means of transport which he is forced to borrow. to visit his family. “The RER B is not really black-white-beur, rather black-beur”, confirms with a burst of laughter Salomé, also from Seine-Saint-Denis.
Traveler’s Disorder
This tense train has become the symbol of a French malaise. Until attracting the attention of our neighbors, perhaps reinforced by the fact that it serves two airports, Roissy-Charles de Gaulle and Orly. In 2017, the British weekly The Economist makes it a privileged point of observation of the contrasts of the Parisian conurbation, shared between a gleaming capital, a green outskirts in the South and “shabby” suburbs in the North… A finding confirmed in 2019, in an interview at Worldby sociologist Marie-Hélène Bacqué, author of the book Return to Roissy. A trip on the RER B (Seuil, 2019): gentrification of Paris, encystment of the social crisis, disaffiliation of certain popular communes.
Does the RER B particularly illustrate the isolation of the suburbs, to the point of fueling a feeling of relegation? “In some places in 93, it’s the only line that provides access to Paris,” recalls Abou. A specificity disputed by Didier Leschi, director of the Office of Immigration and Integration and former prefect delegated to Equal Opportunities in Seine-Saint-Denis: “The distance is more social than geographical. Is it that the situation is very different on the C line of the R, which goes to Essonne? The problem is more the mental confinement of part of the youth, the feeling that we are not at our place when you go to the heart of Paris.” And then, Salomé points out, “it’s still better to have an RER than not to have a train at all…”
What about incivilities? Simon is convinced to have observed even more than in the Paris metro, from arguments to indelicate telephone calls. As for insecurity, it is impossible to measure it, in the absence of official data specific to the RER B. Would the statistics justify the caution of Salomé, who, “as a Jewish woman”, was careful not to come across the gaze of a group of men?
piece of history
Pure product of the Glorious Thirties, the Regional Expression Network nonetheless embodies modernity first and foremost. This is what a beautiful book to his glory recalls with nostalgia, The RER epic, from A to B, by Fabienne Waks and Sylvie Setier (Le Cherche-Midi, 2017). After the RER A, launched in 1969, the RER B, inaugurated in 1977, extends to Châtelet-les-Halles the old Line of Sceaux (1846), railway originally connecting the Parisian place of Denfert- Rochereau to the municipality of Sceaux. The idea, revolutionary for the time: a large gauge metro crossing the Paris region at high speed from East to West and from North to South, and connecting it directly to the many districts of Paris.
The shortening of journeys, assure its promoters, will offer city dwellers additional free time. In 1978, on the occasion of the opening of the Saint-Michel-Notre-Dame station on line B, the Prime Minister at the time, Jacques Chirac, even ensured, in this technocratic sabir of which he so abused : “The convenience of travel is the first condition for the freedom of urban life and its enjoyment.” Words that are not lacking in salt today… A sign of the times: it is now ecological ambition that justifies the presidential objective of developing an RER network in the ten main French cities, announced to everyone’s surprise there a few days.
Salome
Failing to offer the promised comfort, this B line is at least a small piece of history. And a fascinating kaleidoscope of the Paris conurbation. You just have to go up there to see it. In the capital, we stop at the Cité Universitaire. A generous project, born from the rubble of the First World War, aiming to welcome students from all over the world in model accommodation to promote understanding between peoples… We pass by Saint-Michel-Notre-Dame, a station in the name of Post card. In Saint-Denis sits the Stade de France, which still resonates with the exploits of a “black-white-blue” team, one evening in July 1998. Then we approach the old red suburbs of Aubervilliers, Aulnay, Sevran. And if you decide to turn back and head south, you will find the Maison des Examinations, terror of students, at the Laplace station. In Sceaux, the Lakanal high school is famous for its English architectural touch. Finally, the Lozère station evokes the memory of Charles Péguy, who boarded the train here to reach the headquarters of his magazine in Paris, the Notebooks of the Fortnight.
Poetry
Does the RER B conceal unsuspected charms? It is still hard to imagine a political leader ensuring there will be “moments of grace”, as Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, an unsuccessful candidate for mayor of Paris, did in 2013 on the subject of the metro… Moreover, unsurprisingly, the passengers on the line are not very sensitive to its amenities. “It doesn’t make you dream… There isn’t a lot of poetry, of escape. We’re a bit locked up in a set of grays, concrete, tags”, laments Salomé.
Authors nevertheless try to detect its poetry. As early as 1990, in his book Passengers of the Roissy Express (Seuil), François Maspero publishes a travel diary around the line, illustrated with photographs by Anaïk Frantz. Initially, this observation: “Paris had become a large commercial area and a Disneyland of culture. Where had life gone? In the suburbs.” The result is a stroll full of tenderness between the tagged stations, the bars of buildings of the Rose des vents, a city of Aulnay-sous-Bois, and the lime trees of the Ourcq canal. A book that also expresses the loneliness and disarray of the “true deep France”.
Maspero and Frantz are emulated. On the occasion of the 2017 presidential election, sociologist Marie-Hélène Bacqué and photographer André Mérian decided to follow in their footsteps. The goal: to go beyond media clichés to tell the reality of territories unfairly reduced, according to them, to clichés on concrete, poverty, Islam and insecurity. Even more disturbing than Passengers of the Roissy Expresstheir logbook looks like a suburban version of The use of the world, the cult travelogue, between Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, by the writer Nicolas Bouvier. Kurdish restaurant in Val-d’Oise with flavors from the Middle East, Chinese farmers growing chives in Seine-et-Marne, Indians and Pakistanis rubbing shoulders with Jehovah’s Witnesses in a square in Sevran, large villas in Bagneux, a small university town in Gif-sur-Yvette, equipped with cycle paths and sports fields like an American campus… It gives off the image of a colorful and multicultural France.
loss of hope
Far from the pages of books, the galley of Ile-de-France travelers is likely to last. Ile-de-France Mobilités is watching the overhaul of the signaling system and the installation of new, more modern and “capacity” trains, scheduled for 2025. And hopes a lot, to relieve congestion on the RER, from the creation of four new metro lines , in 2030. On the side of Aéroports de Paris (ADP), where it is admitted that the difficulties of the “B” affect the attractiveness of Roissy, we yearn for the opening of the CDG Express (2027), which will directly link the airport to Gare de l’Est.
Like Salomé and Abou, RER passengers seem to have lost hope. “I will never take it again, assures the first, now installed in the capital. I still prefer to pay a taxi three times its price…”. Abou is impatiently waiting to buy a motorbike. “On the RER B, I suffered too much…”, he confides. We bet that line B will continue to haunt their bad dreams for a long time.